Grave Error

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “Don’t hit me again, Michael,” she begged softly. “Please.”

  I thought Nelson was going to slap her again, but he was just adjusting the bandage over his wound. “That’s enough, isn’t it?” I said to him. “You’ve clubbed her and she’s hurt and begging for mercy. Let the cops do the rest.”

  “No.”

  “Please, Michael,” Mrs. Nelson urged. “Let me go. You’ve won. I can’t hurt you now. I’ll leave the country. Let me go.”

  Nelson looked at her but didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll do whatever you want, Michael,” she pleaded. “I’ll tell the police you killed my old man in self-defense. Write it out. I’ll sign it. Whatever you want. Then you won’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Nothing to worry about.” Nelson aped her words and shook his head. His free hand rolled into a fist. “Get back on the bed,” he ordered suddenly. “Whores should always die in bed.”

  Nelson gestured with the gun and prodded his wife with his foot. She sobbed and crawled slowly onto the bed, back to the pillows, and turned to face us, her cheeks wet with tears and blood. “Where’s Rodman?” Nelson asked me.

  “I left him with Luis. By now he should be in jail.”

  “Luis. Other than my father, he was the one I missed the most over the years. How is he?”

  “He’s all right, but if you wind up in jail and they sell the ranch, Luis will end up in a barrio taking handouts from a social worker. Think about it.”

  “Luis is well known in the valley. Any rancher there would welcome having him as his foreman. Where’s Claire?”

  “In my apartment.”

  “Did she say anything about me?”

  “What she said was better than you deserve.”

  “Perhaps. How about Rodman? Did she hear the things he said about her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “I don’t know. You can find out for yourself if you give me the gun. I’ll take you to her.”

  “If I had only recognized Rodman,” Nelson went on. “If I had known he was from Oxtail I might have seen what Angie was up to long ago. He was her instrument in all of this. She played him like a Stradivarius. Her instrument and her stud.”

  Over on the bed Jacqueline Nelson muttered a curse. “You wouldn’t recognize a stud if you saw one,” she sneered, then turned to me. “He’s become impotent, did you know that? The great Roland Nelson can’t get it up. That’s what made me hire you in the first place, Tanner. I figured he was getting it someplace else and that was why he couldn’t satisfy me. But now I don’t think so. Now I think he just can’t cut it anymore.”

  Time went by. Nelson was lost in his past. His wife stared at him intently. Suddenly her face softened, her voice became full and warm, gorged with allure. “I could change all that, Michael,” she purred. “You know I could.”

  Carefully, her eyes unblinking, fixed on her husband, she hunched her shoulders and slipped her arm out of the remaining strap of her gown. The bodice fell to her waist and both breasts swung free. They were large and soft, beyond the proportions of the rest of her.

  Her back arched. “Look at me, Michael. Look at me.” She cradled her breasts in her palms and squeezed them, kneading slowly, her eyes lowered briefly to inspect her work. The nipples hardened and thrust toward Nelson, as if to mock his incapacity. I didn’t want to be where I was.

  Nelson watched impassively, his expression mildly curious. Angie rolled to her side and then to her knees. She bent forward at the waist, leaning out toward Nelson, peering up at him with eyes as black as space. Her lips parted and curled with passion. Raising her palms, she offered her breasts.

  “You used to like them so much,” she murmured. “Sucking them. Licking them. Remember, Michael? Remember that first time? You weren’t impotent then. You came the moment you touched them. Remember? Remember how it was?”

  Nelson’s expression was as frozen as the moment, betraying nothing.

  “You used to call them your balloons. Remember how much you liked them? ‘I want to play with my balloons,’ you used to say. And I let you play with them, didn’t I? Whenever you wanted. Remember? None of those other girls let you do that, did they? Not your precious Sara. I was good for you, remember? Remember how good I was? And you were good for me. It could be that way again, Michael. Whenever you want.”

  Her hands dropped to the gown bunched at her waist. Rising off her haunches, she peeled the cloth off her hips, down to her knees, then shoved it behind her until she was free of it, and naked. Leaning back on her hands, she straightened her legs in front of her. “Look at me, Michael. Look.” One knee rose slowly, then the other. “Look at me.” Her legs spread, then, wider and wider, until her sex glistened at the vortex like honey in a dark and tangled hive.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, Michael. Fuck me. You know you want to. I can do things you’ve never dreamed about, things that will make it like it used to be. Come on.”

  Nelson seemed hypnotized. He stared, unblinking and transfixed, his eyes on her crotch. Words of love and lust eddied from her lips, indistinguishable, beyond translation. Her hands roamed her thighs and breasts and belly. She had summoned everything that instinct and experience, heritage and accomplishment had taught her about men and desire.

  It went like that for a while, a desperate drama plunging toward tragedy. I was about to put a stop to it, one way or another, when Nelson moaned and stood up. The smile on Angie’s face said she thought she had won, and she reached out for him.

  Nelson spit on her.

  “You bastard,” she screamed, “you fucking bastard.”

  She wiped the spit off with her palm and rubbed it roughly into a blanket. “Listen to me,” she demanded roughly. “Just listen to me, you son of a bitch. I’m going to get up now. I’m going to get off this bed and put on a dress and walk out that door and you’re not going to stop me. Do you know why? I’ll tell you, you prick, and you’d better think it over good. It’s about your darling Claire. That’s right. If you poke that fucking gun at me one more time, or do anything else to keep me from leaving here, I’m going to tell you something about Claire that will haunt you the rest of your miserable life. You hear me, you bastard? Think about it. Think about it good. Now. I’m getting out of here. If you point that gun at me you’ll regret it till the day you die.”

  Jacqueline Nelson climbed slowly, contemptuously off the bed and turned her back on her husband. She walked to a closet and pulled out a flowery shift and raised it over her head and dropped it over her flesh. After slipping her feet into a pair of sandals she reached for a large handbag that hung on the closet door.

  I was watching her, admiring her bluff, but I should have been watching Nelson. By the time I looked over at him it was too late to do anything but draw my gun and shoot him.

  THIRTY-SIX

  There was only one explosion, but it produced two bullets and two wounds. Mrs. Nelson screamed, then the shrillness dispersed into words. “She’s not yours. Do you hear me, Michael? She’s not your kid.”

  They were meant to maim, but they missed the mark. Roland Nelson couldn’t hear a word she said. My bullet had hit him in the bicep and knocked him to the floor. It wasn’t a mortal wound, but on top of the other one it was enough to send him into shock and from there into unconsciousness.

  I got out my knife and cut up a sheet and did what I could to stop the bleeding. Then I tossed a blanket over him and made sure he was breathing evenly. The last thing I did was pry the forty-five out of his fingers and drop it in my pocket.

  Nelson had gotten off his shot just as I nicked him. I’d made him miss the spot he was aiming for, but not by enough. His wife was lying in the narrow space between the bed and the closet, absurdly clutching the handbag to her chest.

  She had been hit in the upper thigh, and already there was a pool of blood seeping into the carpet beneath her. As I approached her she twisted away, but I finally got hold of the
caftan and raised it until I could see the blood spurting out of the punctured artery. When I stood up she let the handbag go and grasped her thigh and squeezed it, as if to strangle the pain.

  I tore up a pillowcase and bandaged the gash as well as I could, but there wasn’t enough pressure to stop the bleeding so I pulled off my tie and wrapped it around her thigh and tightened it with a candlestick and knotted it in place. That seemed to slow things down. Mrs. Nelson released her grip and leaned back and watched me carefully.

  The telephone had been knocked off the table when Nelson fell. I picked it up and called an ambulance and told them to hurry. The woman on the other end sounded like she hadn’t hurried since puberty. Then I dialed again and talked to a man I knew at police headquarters. He didn’t ask any questions, he just listened. That’s why I called him.

  Nelson was still out, so I pulled a chair up next to the bed and looked down at his wife. She was someone I had never seen before, a wounded lynx with matted hair and swollen features and wild and flashing eyes. She had killed three people, and someone had tried to kill her in return. Maybe I should have felt sorry for her; a lot of very smart people think retribution is unseemly. I guess I’m not that smart.

  “Am I going to die?” she asked hoarsely.

  “Sooner or later.”

  “I mean now. From this.”

  “I don’t know. You’ve lost a lot of blood and I couldn’t get it stopped. Not all of it.”

  She managed a grin. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I’d like a chance at a jury. Before I was through I’d have them convinced the world is better off without Whitson or any of the rest of them.”

  Some time passed, too much of it. It seemed I could hear the sound of blood spilling out, of life leaking away into sodden strands of wool and jute. Nelson groaned, but his eyes didn’t open. Mrs. Nelson looked over at him. “I didn’t think he’d shoot,” she said. “Men usually do what I want.”

  “Usually’s never quite enough.”

  I got up and checked her bandage. It was red and soaked, so I tightened the tourniquet another turn. I still didn’t hear what I was listening for.

  “Have you ever hated, Tanner? I mean really hated, so bad you couldn’t breathe right, so bad you wanted to scream as loud as you could and keep screaming until it all got better?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, that’s the way I felt about them.”

  “Who?”

  “The Whitsons and the rest of the people in Oxtail, the ones who looked down their noses at me because I lived in a shack by the tracks and my father was a drunk and my mother took in sewing.”

  “That’s not enough,” I said. “Sara Brooke comes from people like that. It’s not fatal.”

  “Sara Brooke. Well, Sara Brooke didn’t have a greaser for a mother, Tanner. You know what the boys used to call me? ‘Semispic.’ No one ever called Sara Brooke that. Not in her whole fucking blonde-haired life.”

  I’d missed that part and I shouldn’t have. The name Valdez was printed in the newspaper I’d found at Mrs. Peel’s house and I should have picked up on it. Race. The inescapable, irremediable brand. The wound that would fester for twenty years and then break open and leave only dead in a trail of pus and poison.

  “From the day I was born they treated me like dirt,” Angie Peel went on. “I was pretty and I was smart, everything but rich and white. When I was thirteen the rich boys started asking me for dates. For a while they took me to the movies or dancing or the other places kids used to go, but pretty soon the only place I ever ended up was on a blanket in the nearest orchard with my dress over my head and some pimply kid ripping the hell out of my panties trying to get them off. And you know what they said when I told them I wanted to go to the movies instead of out parking? They said they couldn’t take me anywhere someone might see us, because their folks had told them they couldn’t go out with me, that I wasn’t good enough for them.”

  “So you decided to get back at them.”

  “You’re damned right I did. They thought I was a tramp, so that’s what I became. By the time I was sixteen the whole town was trying to get a piece. Not just kids, either. I laid the Episcopal preacher in the church basement and the Ford dealer in the back seat of a new Continental. They all came around, and I made them pay for what they got. Money and presents. By the time I was a senior I was the best-dressed girl in the county. I only had one thing going for me, Tanner, and I learned how to use it a long time ago when daddy caught me and a neighbor boy fooling around in the shed and daddy decided he wanted to do some fooling around of his own. It wasn’t so bad, actually. Daddy was usually too drunk to do anything much. All I had to do was touch him and let him touch me. I got to be damned good at that, Tanner. Touching men.”

  “What made you take up with Michael Whitson?”

  “Hell, I wasn’t interested in Michael. I wanted to get next to his old man. He had all the money in town and I figured if I could get him hot for me I’d have it made. I used to show up out there when I knew Michael wasn’t home and flirt like crazy with the old bastard. I would have had him, too, if that wreck hadn’t happened.”

  “You’re still after his money, aren’t you? That’s what this is all about.”

  “Sure. I wanted it all: the ranch, the bank, everything the old fucker had. And I would have had it, if you hadn’t come along.”

  “Someone always comes along,” I said.

  “You sound like a preacher, Tanner. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  She winced from a spark of pain, then closed her eyes. “You made me hurry things up,” she went on. “I had it all worked out, but you screwed up the timetable.”

  “What was the plan?”

  “Just like you said. The plan was for me to inherit the Whitson fortune.”

  “How did you figure it would happen?”

  “Well, after I recognized Michael on TV and put the squeeze on him I sent a note to old man Whitson telling him his son was alive. I made it seem like Michael had written it. That way I was sure Whitson wouldn’t start giving his dough to charity or anything stupid like that, instead of saving it for his son.”

  “Did you always plan to kill him?”

  She shook her head. “I was willing to let nature take its course, if it didn’t take too long, as long as I had Michael under control. Then when the old man died, I’d see to it that Roland’s true identity became known, and he’d waltz in and claim all that loot. Once Roland had it, I could handle things however I wanted. At least I thought I could, until I had a talk with Andy Potter.”

  “About what?”

  “I always thought that as Roland’s wife I’d have a right to half of anything he owned. Community property, you know. But Andy told me that anything Roland inherited would be all his and that I wouldn’t have any right to it, even if we got divorced.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s a pretty shitty deal, if you ask me. So when I heard that I asked Andy a few more questions about this inheritance stuff. I figured out I had to either have Roland die without leaving any will at all or have him make out a will leaving everything to me. I’ll show you what I did. Look in that drawer. The blue envelope.”

  I went to the dresser and found what she was talking about. It was a handwritten will signed by Michael Whitson, also known as Roland Nelson. It revoked all previous wills and codicils and left twenty thousand dollars to Claire Nelson and the rest of the estate to Jacqueline, his beloved wife. It was dated December 10, 197. The last digit of the year was missing.

  “See? If Roland tried to outsmart me and make another will I could put any year on that one I wanted and make it the most recent, so this one would overrule any others. These written ones are good, aren’t they? Andy said they were.”

  “They’re good. Which brings us to Claire. Why did you bring her into it?”

  “Well, I could have left well enough alone, but I heard something about when a man makes a will and leaves his kid out and the court say
s it’s an accident or something, that the kid gets the dough anyway. What do they call that?”

  “A pretermitted heir.”

  “Yeah. I was afraid Claire might show up out of the blue someday and put the glom on everything I got. I figured I’d be better off with her right here where I could keep an eye on her.”

  “What if the holograph didn’t hold up? What if Nelson left a second will you couldn’t beat?”

  “Well, he’d leave everything to Claire and I’m Claire’s mother. She doesn’t have any kids, and her grandparents and her father would be dead. As I understand it, if Claire met with an accident, why I’d be her only heir. I’d get everything she had.”

  “Tidy.”

  “And I had it covered one other way.”

  “Rodman?”

  She smiled stiffly. “Pretty slick, huh?”

  That wasn’t quite the word for it. “Why did your mother have to die?”

  “She knew what I looked like. Like an idiot I went back to see her once, after the plastic surgery. She was the only one other than Al who had seen my new face. The surgeon was dead and the nurses were long gone. I couldn’t take the chance that the old lady would blow the whistle. She was too religious. You never know what those types are going to do.”

  “So let’s assume you ended up with the Whitson property. What were you going to do?”

  “Live like a fucking queen for one thing. And mess up a few lives for another.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, I’d call in a few loans at the bank and foreclose some mortgages and buy a few businesses and fire a few employees and cut off water rights to a few ranchers and campaign like hell against a few politicians. Little things like that, to make their lives as pleasant as they made mine.”

  Bitterness burned through the pain and scorched her words. It wasn’t hard to understand her vendetta. Most hideous crimes are committed by people just like Angie, people who have spent their lives standing outside the candy store, looking through the window and licking their lips at all the goodies inside, wanting more than anything to have just one big hunk of taffy, but always being shouldered aside to let other kids in the door. A lot of self-loathing and antagonism builds up during that kind of existence, and it’s an explosive mixture. Once in a while a spark sets it off. Then the papers introduce us to the Charlie Starkweathers and the Richard Specks and the Charlie Mansons and everyone wonders why they do what they do. Well, the Angie Peels of the world can tell you exactly why they do it. But nobody ever asks them. Not till it’s too late.